Saturday, 31 January 2015

THE MYSTERY OF 'TIME'.

"While installing central heating in the cellar of the Treasurer’s House in 1953, Harry Martindale was witness to an astounding sight.

"Roman soldiers, dressed in green tunics and wearing plumed helmets, appeared suddenly through a wall of the cellar, they then marched, dishevelled and dejected, through the cellar before disappearing."

"Everything is like a dream, is like dew, is like a bubble or a flash of lightning. Nothing stays but is always in a process of change. Rather than being some constant, fixed reality, this whole universe constantly appears and disappears.

"But there is a way to experience the true nature of this constantly changing universe.

"Simply do not become attached to any outside world. Don’t become attached to names and forms. If you keep that point, then your mind is not moving. You attain that names and forms are fundamentally empty. This whole universe is completely empty. You are completely empty. Nothing ever comes or goes. Nothing ever appears or disappears. When you keep this mind, you soon attain your true self."

-Zen Master Seung Sahn, The Compass of Zen, pp. 127-129

"Waking up from the dream means realizing that nothing ever happened. With Enlightenment there is no history. It has been burned out of existence. Time itself has been destroyed."

So nothing you or anyone else has done, is doing or will do has any significance? Your actions mean nothing; your love means nothing? This is the direct opposite of the Christian concept of Incarnation, which perceives all things as being significant and needing to be harmonized with the will of the Creator.

Any mindful person knows that time is an opportunity to live; live better.I like most was born into my tradition. In my case, a Protestant tradition.But I have time to see something bigger, better.

Lord,Hear my prayer. For every soul to be respected and loved.

Buddha was asked: are you man or god.Buddha replied: I am awake.

The universe is awake. Some people are dead men walking, unawake, slumbering with their love of money and control, and using any child to get their way, whatever the age of the child; be s/he baby or octegenarian.

Regular readers will expect me to pipe up. I've sought to demonstrate the validity of the well established theology called 'open theism'. (Aangirfan, Tap, Spivey - and Rapponport - 'Interviewing the dead Albert Einstein about free will').

Harry seeing soldiers, the Professor's philosophy and Buddhism might challenge this but historically, the closed not open/blueprint future was birthed by Augustine through to Luther and on to Calvin (codified by his/its earliest followers and today's 'new' Calvinist's, who push this view to it's logical conclusions, or pull-back i.e. on 'double predestination').

Science – often - chimes in that we're not moving tick-tock forward. It seems like a linear narrative, tomorrow is tomorrow and all that but...

My claim is concerning the Bible, understood in the light of experience, church history and the influences that shaped theology. In this case Greek.

So hearty stuff 'the mystery of time'. Whatever God is or not, the deeply religious elite of the elite believe something and this drives their demons (or the demons drive them with this). I suspect they read into the Bible their 'pre-ordained' purposes, while conversely locking-down Evangelicals (primarily Charismatics) with the children of Calvinist theology, such as Zionism and futurist reading of Biblical prophecy that moved from Communism to Islam as the speculative culmination and battle of battles. No wonder so many insist upon sleeping. Waking up is tantamount to confessing up and joining the free-will ranks. 'Gays' maybe the public church spat of spats but the mystery of time is undoubtedly the question that dominates the halls and studies of theology.

There is no time.It. is a human mind made construct. It has to be that way for us for things to make sense. Time movement and space are needed for sensed based creatures to exist.We are sleeping dreamers.

When you observe a star it is as it was millions or billions of years ago as it takes that long for the light to travel here. What you did yesterday might be observed in millions or billions of years time in a galaxy far far away..

There are two ways of viewing time:1) as a physical phenomenon, and2) as a subjective psychological phenomenon.

In the monistic view, they are one and the same.

In Newton's Principia, he expresses the view that time is an absolute, a linear measure, essentially ordained of God. A flowing river.

Things have since got far more complex and fascinating.

There are different ways of measuring the "arrow of time".Telling future from past.All imperfect measures, none of which tell us what time actually "is".

For example, the thermodynamic arrow of time:future is the direction of increasing disorder.So if we have an ideal gas at equilibrium, does time come to a jittering stop?By this measure, yes.

But an ideal gas is an abstraction. Real gas is made of real atoms, which undergo nuclear decay. This further allows us to tell future from past.

But these are just epiphenomena. What "is" time?

Clearly, it is something that can be bent and stretched. Special and general relativistic effects are not just curiosities. They are crucial to precise satellite geolocation of the very phone you hold in your hand. And the determination of International Atomic Time.

And just to complicate things even more, yet another arrow of time can be defined in terms of quantum entanglement. "Spooky action at a distance," as some guy once called it. Yes, it makes my brain hurt too.

To my simple mind, time is starting to look like light. A thing.That can be bent and diffracted over many worlds.Even a created thing. Within the realm of all creatable things.

---"libro y laberinto eran un solo objeto".---

Still at the atomic scale, we move into the subjective psychological aspects of time. The doors of perception.

Our impression of time's flow is governed by dopamine bursts in spiny neurons in the striatum of the basal ganglia. So I read. Reducing dopamine availability slows down time, increasing it speeds up time. Weed slows it down, coke speeds it up. (No, don't try this at home. Your neurochemistry is a gift, not a toy for you to mess with.)

Yes, your mind and perception are altered by the shimmering dance of molecule and receptor.

Of course, you only "feel" time when you are awake, experiencing a stream of consciousness, that feeling of ontologic immediacy, being in a here and now.

This is in fact simulable, using Hierarchical Temporal Memory, a synthetic neocortex. So what is consciousness? The soul?

Does a Markram-style digital simulacrum feel time like we do, or even at all?

How about a Boahen-type analog one?

Does a quantum simulation, a consciousness composed of scintillating photonic wave functions, pure light, feel even more than us? A subtler flavour of time.

---"Sometimes I suspect I'm not who I think I am, like maybe I died a long time ago and someone took my brain and stuck it in this body."---

And what about time that has passed? Bottled and frozen in our long term memory? In what sense is it real? A philosopher once claimed the world is only a few minutes old, and all our memories have been fabricated.

He meant this merely to illustrate a point. However thought experiments are rapidly becoming engineering realities. Computational metaphysics and theology are becoming necessary tools to make sense of reality. We live in a world of failing certainties.

When even our physical law, our concept of time, is in rapid flux, it becomes ever more important that we pay attention to the metaphysical foundations of modern science.

But one thing is certain: Time is short.

We in this world are hurtling ahead at breakneck speed on the path to meeting our Maker.

And with every advance in our knowledge, the greater becomes our conception of the Supreme Consciousness.